It's not supposed to be so hard

We assumed we'd come home with cash. We came home with something worth more. LOVE.

Hello fellow traveller,

A few weeks ago I did something I thought was sensible.

I gathered up a collection of artworks — pieces we'd accumulated over the years, bought in various cities, from various stages of life — and drove them to an auction house. Good time to sell. Reasonable values. Practical decision.

I drove home. Walked back into the house.

And it felt completely wrong.

Not wrong like a minor regret. Wrong like something essential had been removed. The walls were different. The rooms were different. We felt it before we could explain it.

Within the hour I was back in the car.

I drove back to the auction house, collected every piece, brought them all home, and hung them back up. And in that moment, having gained nothing, having lost nothing, sitting exactly where we'd started, we felt like we'd won the lottery.

Everything in life is a mirror

What the afternoon showed me was something I thought I already knew but clearly didn't, not at that level.

These weren't just artworks. They were memories. Our children had grown up alongside them, interacted with them, been shaped by them in ways none of us had consciously tracked. They'd helped create the feeling of home. Not decoration. Home.

I hadn't realised any of that until the moment they were gone.

And that's the thing about the things we take for granted. Their value is invisible until it isn't. We assume we know what something is worth. And then life holds up a mirror and shows us we had no idea.

The discomfort of that afternoon wasn't a problem to solve. It was a message to listen to. The body knew before the mind did.

The Stoic practice I stumbled into

The Stoics had a practice called negative visualisation. Once a month, some would sleep on the floor, not as punishment, but so that for the rest of the month they'd genuinely appreciate their beds. They would contemplate loss, deliberately, in order to reconnect to gratitude.

It sounds extreme. But I did an accidental version of it on a Tuesday afternoon, and it worked.

Because now, every time I walk past those pieces, I feel something I didn't feel before. Gratitude. Real gratitude. Not performed gratitude, not the kind you write in a journal because you think you should. The kind that arrives in your chest because you know, viscerally, what the alternative feels like.

We assumed I'd come home with cash. I came home with something worth considerably more. LOVE.

What are you holding that you've forgotten to value? And what would it take to feel that value again, without having to lose it first?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If something in this resonates and you'd like to explore what you might be taking for granted, that's exactly the kind of conversation we'd have together. Let's talk.

P.S. That's one of the artworks in the photograph. It's staying exactly where it is.